“Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art) magazine appeared during a watershed in Japanese publishing history: when pattern and design books became standalone works of art. The first Japanese pattern books — colorless woodblock manuals, known as hinagata-bon (???) — were created in the 1660s, when political stability and a bullish economy fostered an expansion in fashion and a desire for voguish textiles. While growing out of this genre, the colorful and abstract designs in Shin-Bijutsukai magazine (1902–1906) reflect a convergence of historical and technological shifts in turn-of-the-century Japanese society. Notably, artists traveling abroad on government grants encountered Art Nouveau and Japonisme — the Western European fondness for a mediated, Japanese aesthetic — which they, in turn, folded back into domestic patterns: forging originality through the prism of cross-cultural pollination.

Emboldened by innovations in book production, such as newfound color-printing capabilities, and seeking to keep pace with developments in manufacturing, the Unsodo and Unkindo publishing houses began to collaborate with artists to print a type of book known as zuan-cho (???), featuring designs for textiles, lacquerware, screens, ceramics, and other crafts. As the British Library notes, “some of these were meant as source books for artisans”, but others “were conceived as beautiful objects to be enjoyed for their own sake”.

Published by Unsodo, Shin-Bijutsukai was edited by Furuya Korin (1875–1910) and overseen by Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), the artist of A World of Things (Momoyogusa), who has been hailed as “the greatest twentieth-century Japanese designer”.

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Like its editor, Shin-Bijutsukai (1902–1906) plots a similar course between timeless themes and novel influences — with title pages announcing, in English, a “New Monthly Magazine of Various Designs by the Famous Artists of To-Day”. With contributions from a variety of artists, the most striking designs in the magazine are captivatingly abstract and layered, dislocating the imagination from place or period: pastel blobs beneath a translucent surface crackled with leaf shapes; oozing, cellular frames encasing beautiful plant matter; a forest whose canopy dissolves into a wash of spilled wine.” (Hunter Dukes).